To cope with different service environments, there is often a need for network grouping isolation in the conventional network architecture, and correspondingly, related software and hardware technologies have been developed. Among others, a commonly used way is to use real network hardware and virtual local area networks (VLAN), which accomplish the network grouping isolation mainly through use of network apparatuses in combination with a specific communication protocol.
However, as the complexity of network grouping increases with the advancement of the network technologies, more network apparatuses are needed to satisfy the need for network grouping isolation and this leads to a remarkably increased cost of the hardware and maintenance thereof. Furthermore, as the number of network apparatuses increases, introduction of the VLAN technology will cause a problem that the whole network might be disrupted due to erroneous settings of protocols (e.g., Trunking Protocol) of a small part of the apparatuses.
Even further, in the conventional network architecture, isolation of at most 4095 VLANs can be supported in a single physical network, which has become inadequate to satisfy the current network demands. Although nowadays the virtual extended local area network (VXLAN) is available to allow for more than 4096 VLANs in a physical network, the VXLAN requires use of additional hardware network apparatuses that are costly.
Therefore, in order to reduce the cost and increase the number of network grouping isolations simultaneously, primarily the conventional software-defined network (SDN) technology is used. Specifically, the SDN technology accomplishes the network grouping isolation mainly by use of a software protocol (e.g., OpenFlow). Apart from decreasing the number of network apparatuses to reduce the cost, this also allows for grouping isolation of more than 4095 LANs through software parameter definition.
However, in the current SDN technology, assignment of settings for the isolated grouping of the network is accomplished by the administrator, and as in the conventional technology, there is also a risk of network abnormal conditions due to erroneous settings as the complexity of the network grouping increases. Even further, in the SDN architecture, the control layer not only has to process general network packets (e.g., OpenFlow network packets), but also needs to provide an additional API interface to allow calling of other pieces of virtual management software in order to accomplish the isolation grouping and environment setting. Then, the architecture and the management setting of the conventional network isolation grouping technologies are still too complex.
Accordingly, an urgent need still exists in the art to provide a solution that can make an improvement on the shortcomings of the conventional technologies, simplify the architecture and the process flow of management setting, and accomplish the network isolation grouping automatically and directly so as to improve both the efficiency and the accuracy of the grouping.